We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
MESSAGES
TO AMERICAN y SCHOOL TEACHERS
Ho11
fl
r
From the Eagle’s Flest
George Grey Barnard, the American sculptor, used always to speak of the fertile prairies and riverdands of the Middle West as “the eagle’s nest of our democracy.” There Abraham Lincoln was born and raised, and there became the great champion of the kind of freedom that has brought us to world leadership.
He knew the value of education because he was denied its advantages. All told he figured that between his eighth and fifteenth birthdays he had twelve months of schooling, and that primitive. And he, as few others, knew the value of reading, for his thoughtful perusal of a few good books laid the foundation for his supreme service in saving our form of government.
“One of the first, and certainly one of the most important duties of every school teacher today is the planting of Lincoln’s sort of Americanism in the hearts and minds of our youth,” says Dr. Vernon L. Nickell, State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Illinois, adopted state of the Great Emancipator. “As guides to the understanding anci appreciation of his concept of government of, by and for the people, our teachers — whether in one-room or high schools and colleges — carry a responsibility second to none. Now, in the confusion of war’s aftermath, they must sense as never before the need for their leadership in classroom development of good citizenship.
“1 feel that the School Edition of The Reader’s Digest should be classed among the valuable mediums for aiding this vital task allotted them. It is, in effect, a bridge between textbook information and the actual working-out of our principles and ideals in everyday life. It presents so many phases of our republican form of government in action, and so clearly sets forth the soundest of our social and political ideals that it helps to prepare our youth not only for support of these, but for protecting them against the efforts of subversive groups to take advantage of inevitable postwar confusion.”